This is the first comprehensive collection of essays on Irish design and visual culture which draws from interdisciplinary fields to address design history as an emergent field in Irish Studies. This volume explores the contribution of the visual and cultural analyses to an understanding of Irish historiography and adds to the broader contextualisation of Irish modernity within an international context.

Ireland, Design and Visual Culture is an edited collection of interdisciplinary essays on the subject of design and visual culture in Ireland from 1922 to the early 1990s. The essays, written from different disciplinary and academic perspectives, explore the tensions inherent in the visualisation of the newly emergent State from the 1920s. The book explores the shaping of Irish modernity within such visual discourses as architecture, advertising, currency, illustration, industrial design, print ephemera, public spectacle and theatre design, within an international context and suggests that Irish society was more open to European and American visual and cultural influence than has previously been considered.

Preface: Luke Gibbons; Introduction: Materiality, Modernity and the Shaping of Identity-Linda King and Elaine Sisson; Experimentalism and the Irish Stage: Theatre and German Expressionism in the 1920s- Elaine Sisson; Technology and modernity: the Shannon Scheme and visions of national progress- Sorcha O'Brien; Nationality and Representation: the Coinage Design Committee (1926-8) and the formation of a design identity in the Irish Free State - Paul Caffrey; An Gúm, The Free State and the Politics of the Irish Language- Brian Ó Conchubhair; Republic of Virtue: the campaign against evil literature and the assertion of Catholic moral authority in Free State Ireland - Michael Flanagan; Vanishing Borders: the representation of political partition in the Free State 1922-1949- Ciaran Swan; 'Funereal black trucks advertising Guinness' The St Patrick's Day Industrial Pageant- Mike Cronin; (De)constructing the Tourist Gaze: Dutch Influences and Aer Lingus Tourism Posters, 1951-1961- Linda King; Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Kilkenny Design Workshops and selling 'good' design at American department store promotions, 1967-76- Anna Moran; From Dublin To Chicago and back again: An exploration of the influence of Americanised Modernism on the culture of Dublin's architecture 1945  1975 - Ellen Rowley; The Ephemera of Eternity: the Irish Catholic memorial card as material culture- Mary Ann Bolger; Celtic Revivals: Jim Fitzpatrick and the Celtic Imaginary in Irish and International Popular Culture - Maeve Connolly.

Linda King is a lecturer in Design History and Theory, and Visual Communication Design at The Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire (IADT). Elaine Sisson is a Senior Lecturer at The Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire (IADT) and is the author of Pearse's Patriots: St Enda's and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork University Press, 2004).

As Ireland is noted primarily for its literary, dramatic and musical culture, Irish studies, until now, has focused largely on these specific aspects of Irish culture. Consequently, the paucity of texts discussing design, visual and material culture in Ireland - and their role in the construction of the post-partition state's evolving identity, society and culture - has left a yawning gap in the literature of these fields. In their opening chapter, which introduces us to the editorial theme and theoretical framework underpinning this collection, editors Linda King and Elaine Sisson provide us with clearly elucidated reasons as to why Ireland may have foundered in comparison to other countries in terms of both the development of design as an industry and the simultaneous growth of its associated discourses and literature. They point out that due to the destabilising effect of the political, economic and social upheaval that Ireland underwent during the period of time that the book covers (1922 - 1992), professional design practice in Ireland has 'a relatively short history'. Indeed, it could be argued that it is this suite of contributory factors that gave rise to the fact that this publication is both the first of its kind - and long overdue.

Yet, as is demonstrated in this beautifully designed and illustrated volume, Irish design is significantly less insular and somewhat more diverse than is generally assumed.Many of the essays included (all of which are constituted from original research) encompass material outlining the impact on the development and effect of the practice that American, Scandinavian, German and British design had across a variety of media. The breadth of studies encompassed in this excellent volume is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary in subject matter, and uncovers many heretofore uncharted aspects of Irish design and visual culture.

The editors also point out that from the beginning of its development, Irish design - in the course of its gradual professionalization - was predominantly focused on the promotion of services, and therefore on the communication of ideas, as opposed to the creation of objects. This was due, in large part, to the absence of an Industrial Revolution in Ireland, which led to there being in the country very little in the way of what could be described as indigenous industry. Added to this, stringent and protectionist economic policies, allied to highly conformist social policies prevalent at the inception of the Free State (whose national identity and self-image drew upon the utopian vision of an agrarian, rural nation as opposed to a metropolitan, urban state), prevailed. As a legacy of the nineteenth-century, cultural nationalism and the forces of social conservatism - informed by the overwhelming Catholic hegemony that dominated the first half of the twentieth century - took some time to recede, as did their paralysing economic and social effects.

And yet, whilst overcoming these restrictive circumstances, each of these essays illuminates how the transformative role of design and designed objects was central to the development of Ireland's modernization and the negotiation of the ensuing cultural response - which was necessarily enmeshed in the country's economic and social development.

The rigorous analytical and theoretical lens through which all the topics in the book are explored is tightly focused on modernity and related discourses: national and cultural identity.Despite this, the study loses nothing of the richness of its depth of field. What does become clear is that designed artefacts were not just passive receptacles or surfaces onto which the materialization of modernity was projected, but they also acted as potent and active agents in the hastening and negotiation of its arrival. Nevertheless, this process was not a linear one. Written by an assembly of authors, each of whom is outstanding in their field, the paradoxes, complexities and contradictions intrinsic to the processes of decolonization and the assimilation of modernity through design are meticulously described. From the utilization of German Expressionism in 1920s Irish theatre and stage design in order to disrupt the rise of social conservatism (Elaine Sisson), through the construction of a state sponsored German designed and engineered hydro-electrical power plant (Sorcha O'Brien), to the input of Dutch designers in poster advertising for the national carrier, Aer Lingus (Linda King), each explores the limitations inherent in the concept of modernity itself, effectively highlighting the significance of locally synthesised, syncretic assimilations of modernization that must be taken into account when evaluating ensuing and specific cultural responses.

Although the editors mention that the editorial decision to leave Northern Ireland out of the geographical area covered in this collection was a difficult one, there is no sense of omission here, as Ciaran Swan's contribution on how the evolution of printed visualizations of the border between the south and Northern Ireland reflected shifting political concerns over time neatly bounds and resolves the issue of delimiting the content to southern Ireland. A current underlying many of the pieces is a sense of the deep-rooted tensions prevalent during the development of a contradistinctive identity from Great Britain in the newly autonomous, post-partition state. In particular, Michael Flanagan, in his account of the highly conservative and religious objectives pursued by the Christian Brothers through their publication of Our Boys magazine, stresses the irony of the adoption of modern printing techniques and production values by the Brothers in their attempt to challenge the potential threat of cultural dominance arising from the increasing popularity in the south of brightly coloured and illustrated boys' papers from Britain. Cumann na nGaedhael were presented with a similar quandary, as Brian O Conchubhair explains, in their determined effort to conserve tradition through the preservation of the Irish language and their quest to publish numerous books and texts disseminated through their publishing house,An Gum.

Paul Caffrey's detailed piece on coinage issued for the Free State assesses the difficulty in commissioning the design of a new currency intended to address both a national and international audience, a theme that Anna Moran also probes in her analysis of the increasingly outward-looking marketing and design strategies employed by the state sponsored Kilkenny Design Workshops (in the 1960s), that targeted potential customers both at home, but more significantly, in America. This development reflected Ireland's growing industrial confidence and Mike Cronin's history of the St Patrick's Day industrial parade which ran from the 1950s until the end of the 1960s, effectively serves as a narrative and index of the evolving economic and industrial concerns of the state, simultaneously tracing the country's gradual modernization.

This transition is echoed in Ellen Rowley's fascinating piece on the influence of American modernism on the architecture of Dublin city, from the 1940s until the 1970s. She reveals many of the issues implicit in importing international architectural forms, questioning the wisdom of replacing one cultural hegemony for another in the form of American corporate and cultural imperialism,assessing its residual legacy and impact on the country's capital city.

The continual dialogue between past and future is a consistent thread throughout the book, and yet the permeability of the seam dividing and binding the two is gently teased out by Mary Ann Bolger in her sensitively observed study of Irish Catholic memorial cards. This highly recommended book concludes appropriately with Maeve Connolly's examination of the contemporary expression of liminal temporalities in the neo-Celtic artworks of Jim Fitzpatrick, revealing fragmented glimpses of imagined futures, and - as Luke Gibbons writes in his foreword - 'of worlds yet to come'.

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Ireland, Design and Visual Culture

July 29, 2013

Reviewer:
Derval Tubridy

Given that Ireland is traditionally associated with the spoken and written word, Linda King's and Elaine Sisson's edition Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922-1992 (CorkUP [2011]) is a valuable intervention into the evaluation of Irish culture in the twentieth century, particularly as it comes to terms with the decolonial experience. Ireland, Design and Visual Culture traces, with an astute and nuanced eye, the ways in which the newly independent Ireland used visual culture as a means of dealing with an imperial legacy, developing a cohesive national identity and identifying itself as a modern and progressive culture. The varied and perceptive essays in this collection attest to the fact that not all of these aims were achieved. They identify the fault lines between secular and religious moralities, technology and the agrarian, tradition and modernity. The complex relations between the individual, society and emerging concepts of the politic are analysed with acuity in this strong collection. The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2013, Oxford University Press

The nationalist movement that led to the establishment of an Irish Free State in 1922 was at least in its revolutionary phase strongly driven by an impulse of cultural revival which produced a remarkable body of literature and drama a programme for the restoration of the long retreating Irish language as the main vernacular and a more general commitment to nativist arts crafts and cultural practices. There was a tension at the core of the cultural revival movement between on the one hand a nostalgic conservative preservationist and sometimes reactionary instinct valorising the rural the primitive and the simple and denouncing the rootless city mass produced goods and sensational popular literature and on the other an innovative experimental instinct embracing the modern world and seeking to use the native cultural resources as the raw material for creating new cultural forms. The new Free State as it turned out was dominated from an early stage by a highly conformist Catholic bourgeoisie socially conservative deferential to church authority and teaching in respect of morals and the norms of social behaviour and essentially dependent on the church to provide a system of education and health care within the state. Though the Free State persisted with a largely free trade economic policy throughout the 1920s the signs of social conservatism and cultural timidity appeared early: censorship of films and literature came within the first decade of the establishment of the new state. With the ascendancy of de Valera and his aggressively protectionist policies from 1932 independent Ireland became heavily introspective and confessional in its official culture. Leading writers and artists became to varying degrees dissident witnesses alienated from the dominant cultural tone of the new state. Many simply went into exile. Within the dominant historiography of modern Ireland the war years 1939 45 are generally identified as the climax of this era of protectionist zeal in cultural as well as economic matters. The strains of wartime isolation in neutral Ireland were felt in all aspects of the national life. Signs of increasing popular impatience and of new ideas initiatives and institutions multiply from the later 1940s. The economic new departure of Lemass Whitaker a new direction towards a free trading open economy actively seeking direct foreign investment was matched by a more comprehensive glasnost as Irish social and cultural life became enthusiastically if not always with discrimination more open to international influences. If recent historiography suggests that the introspection and cultural torpor of the early decades after 1922 has been exaggerated the significance of the general reorientation of Irish society from the end of the 1950s is not seriously disputed. Until relatively recently studies of Irish cultural engagement with modernity have been largely concerned with the stellar literary innovators notably Joyce or with clusters of avant garde painters and representational artists. This current volume of essays edited by Linda King and Elaine Sisson however is a welcome addition to an emerging body of scholarly work on design the material and the visual in Irish popular culture. The essays provide an opportunity to explore how modernist ideas were moulded and adapted to Irish cultural specificities p. 36 . There are thirteen essays in all with a short perceptive introduction by Luke Gibbons covering design aspects of such early projections of national identity as stamps and coinage and the monumental engineering statement of the Shannon hydroelectric station at Ardnacrusha together with the design of state subsidised publication of books in the Irish language and the public spectacle of the St Patrick s Day parade. More unusual non state examples discussed include comics and poster art design in the theatre where the 1920s saw precocious experimentation with German Expressionist forms in Dublin and the popular memorial card commemorating dead persons. From the post war period the most important essays are those concerning the design of posters and other tourist branding issues for the national airline Aer Lingus; the influential Kilkenny Design Workshop project 1963 ; and Ellen Rowley s particularly insightful exploration of the influence of Americanised Modernism on the Culture of Dublin s Architecture 1945 75 where the return of a group of Irish architects who had studied in Chicago under Mies or in Philadelphia under Louis Kahn coincided with the socio economic modernisation project of Lemass resulting in what Rowley describes as the triumph of American aestheticised architectural modernism . While there is no attempt in this volume to impose a thesis on such a wide miscellany of case studies the collection invites a number of general observations. The collection broadly reinforces the chronological division between pre war and post war Ireland with the period from c.1945 to the later 1950s witnessing a marked quickening of new initiatives in art design and ideas that would result in Irish design becoming more outwardly focused from the 1950s as discourses of leisure consumption and urbanization became more widely embraced p. 34 . Thomas Bodkin s Report on the Arts in Ireland 1949 was indeed a landmark state initiative in rehabilitating Irish visual culture ; yet as late as 1962 the report of a group of six Scandanavian consultants on Design in Ireland was still highly critical of the general poverty of Irish design culture. Claims that Ireland represents a case of national modernism must be cautiously assessed in the light of the evidence of the majority of the casestudies presented here which confirm that external influences were decisive in determining the timing and depth of the engagement of Ireland s design culture with the currents of modernity: Dutch migr designers steeped in the Bauhaus tradition fashioned the Aer Lingus image; Irish architects trained in the USA transformed the visual culture of building in urban Ireland from the 1950s; Scandanavian critics were the midwives to the birth of the Kilkenny Design Workshop. In short the indigenous energies available for ensuring that Irish visual and design culture would respond creatively to the challenges of modernity should not be exaggerated. This is a substantial collection that makes a significant contribution to the history of ideas as well as to the specifically design focused aspects of Irish cultural studies. The essays are individually valuable and original and for the most part lucid and accessible to scholars of all relevant disciplines.

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Irish scholarly studies of images and objects have

July 5, 2012

Reviewer:
Ann Wilson for Artefact the journal of the Irish from Republic of Ireland

Irish scholarly studies of images and objects have tended to concentrate on a limited range of artefacts often documenting them with the aim of raising the profile of individual practitioners or groups or the status of Irish art craft or design. To this end aesthetic merit and individual creativity were highly valued artistic lineages were established distinctively Irish characteristics were highlighted and the biographical monograph was a popular form. This approach ignored the fact that anonymous mass produced aesthetically insignificant images and objects can often have very important and interesting social roles which is not to say that authored one off works of art cannot also and that therefore an examination of images and objects in terms of the work they do in society can yield very valuable insights not only into the images and objects but also the society in which they functioned. During the 1990s the idea that images and objects could provide an enhanced understanding of the past began to permeate Irish studies although the approach was tentative and often consisted of comparing images to texts in a way that yielded nothing particularly new. Since then there has been an increase in scholarship in this area influenced by major developments internationally in the areas of Visual and Material Culture and Design History. This multi author volume of essays with an introduction by Luke Gibbons presents a selection of the most up to date and sophisticated Irish research on images and objects and the social roles they played in twentieth century Ireland and as such is very welcome. The essays deal with visual and material culture and professional design practice in Ireland from 1922 to about 1992 from the establishment of the state to the sudden increase in prosperity which became known as the Celtic Tiger. The new Free State faced enormous challenges emerging as it did from violent armed struggle including a painful civil war and difficult social and economic decisions which necessitated the careful navigation of discourses of tradition and modernity nationalism and internationalism. The essays only examine the situation in the twenty six county southern state a wise editorial decision as another similarly sized volume would be needed for an analysis of the very different six county state of Northern Ireland. The authors examine a wide and diverse range of images and artefacts unconcerned with their place in the cultural hierarchy. These include publicity material for the building of a hydroelectric power station at Ardnacrusha Co Clare popularly known as the Shannon Scheme and for the national airline Aer Lingus; American shop displays promoting the Kilkenny Design Workshops; Catholic memorial cards; book covers for Irish language publications; theatre set designs; architect designed buildings and undesigned suburban residential projects; coinage; St Patrick s Day parades; images of the partition of the country and of psychedelic neo Celtic fantasies and plates from the Christian Brothers periodical Our Boys. Many of the essays concentrate on popular forms although professional design practice and its contribution to the cultural construction of Ireland and Irishness is also examined. The essays transcend disciplinary barriers and the authors draw freely as needed on concepts such as the imagined community of Benedict Anderson the invented traditions of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger the myth and punctum of Roland Barthes and the thick description of Clifford Geertz as well as a range of ideas associated with postcolonial studies. A recurring theme of several essays is the use of visual and material culture to reconcile the cherished concept of traditional rural Ireland with the modernisation necessary for industrial and economic development. This is an important aspect of for instance Sorcha O Brien s analysis of the discourse surrounding the Shannon Scheme in the 1920s Linda King s discussion of Aer Lingus posters and Anna Moran s investigation of the Kilkenny Design Workshop displays in America. Modernisation was associated with both modernism and internationalism and the ongoing contribution of foreign and/or modernist expertise and ideas to Irish visual and material culture is very evident during the period of study German Expressionist influences on theatre set design; an English designer for the Free State coinage; Dutch graphic designers advertising Ireland for Aer Lingus; Scandinavian influences on Kilkenny Design Workshops; German expertise called on for the Shannon Scheme; American style modernism for architecture; and American psychedelia for images of Celtic Ireland. There also seems to have been a strong sense of the potential power of images and objects to construct an Irish identity apart from that dictated by economic policy. Thus Ciar n Swan discusses the difficulties of visualising a partitioned Ireland and how governments had to tread a fine line between recognising the reality of the border and legitimating it. Michael Flanagan shows how the periodical Our Boys was used as a weapon against popular British literature in the preservation of an Irish Catholic identity and Brian Conchubhair examines the kind of Gaelic Ireland constructed by the covers of Irish language books. Images and objects also functioned as agents of reassurance in an era of change and uncertainty. Thus the publicity for the Shannon Scheme presented technological development in terms of the familiar and on a personal level the invented traditions associated with mass produced memorial cards as discussed by Mary Ann Bolger served to provide a sense of security and continuity in the face of death as well as assert personal and religious identity. Images could also be harnessed for very different purposes however as Elaine Sisson shows in her discussion of how German Expressionist influences were used in theatre designin the 1920s to communicate the tensions and moods of the dramas but also their often anti establishment messages which appealed to disillusioned audiences in post revolutionary Ireland. This book demonstrates how the examination of a broad range of visual and material culture using appropriate theoretical models can provide very rewarding insights. The essays reveal a lively engagement with international modernity and modernist discourse in Ireland throughout the period 1922 92 and a creative appropriation of techniques and approaches as needed. This generated a visual and material culture and growing professional design practice which was a complex mixture of the conservative and the radical the traditional and innovative the national and the international. This view of twentieth century Irish culture contradicts or at least reshapes in more nuanced form some of the received constructions derived from studying other material. As if to draw the reader s attention to the importance of image and object as well as text this book is also a beautiful object of material culture in its own right. Designed by David Smith it is a pleasure to handle and browse through and very importantly contains an excellent selection of very high quality images. The editors authors Cork University Press and the School of Creative Arts in IADT deserve great credit for ensuring that this previously neglected area of scholarship in Ireland is getting published and so well. It is heartening to know that so many scholars are producing such lively and interesting work in this area.

The design of objects offers a powerful way of understanding modernity. But objects are not innocent. That is especially true of the newly emerged Irish State and postcolonial attempts to distinguish itself from British influence using the tools of modernist design in nation building and national identity. Negotiating modernity is very apt given the State s need to navigate modernism by way of a censorious combination of risk averse officialdom and conservative Catholicism. As Luke Gibbons notes in the introduction to this book tradition as represented by craft was integrated with modern manufacture with an ever present need to orientate the dream world of Celtic mythology. Modernism is sometimes phrased as though it were similarly structured everywhere impervious to internal and external conditions. This collection of skilfully edited essays informs us otherwise throwing light on a hitherto obscure historiography. Not only is there an illuminating narrative thread readers are given insights into the tensions inherent in modernism and postcolonialism away from the mainstream. Links with advances in vocational education professional design and the design economy discourse are also made. The book navigates the material culture of theatre design graphics comics architecture festivals industrial design and ephemera. The editors demonstrate in their opening chapter that it is simplistic to see the decades following Ireland s political birth just as a succession of unrelated episodes with divergent influences and shifting identities . the twists and turns evident in King and Sissons navigation of Irish modernity do suggest that there may be National Modernisms not one homogenous modernism.